Cadenza Oratorio
by WanderlustandFreedom
Summary: The story, the rushed-out explanation, is what his mom says. But Luka gets something different, something far more real. This was his dad - his past. And if things had gone differently, maybe he'd been less like him and more like the Bourgeois. -In which Jagged Stone and Anarka Couffaine have a past together.


**Idea is accredited L****ӕrke Fischer on Facebook, Miraculous Ladybug Worldwide Group.**

**I do not own MLB.**

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Is the sea tossing against the hull, or is it just his imagination? Is it the smell of the Seine outside, or the smell of rain on its way? Are those really footsteps down the hall, or can he steal away a few extra moments of silence?

The door opens.

Luka's sitting on his bed, legs crossed, strumming the strings of his guitar and fingering a little scented sticker underneath the tailpiece of the guitar. It's one of Marinette's - her original. He's wearing thick pajamas to protect against the cold that comes in through the floor of the ship and thick socks that feel fluffy but make scratching sounds when he walks. He wiggles his toes a little. Scratch, scratch.

He doesn't look at the person in the doorway, instead closing his eyes, strumming his soft chords, and feeling the room around him by the way the sound feels when it travels back into his body. He can feel it hit the walls, rattle the paint, and return. It brushes against the guitar picks on the wall, checking to make sure they're all in place, and then finds a place in his chest, right near his heart. Some of it escapes out the window and doesn't return, but he hopes it finds someone else with a spot of comfort.

"Luka," his mom calls.

Luka opens his eyes, removes the strap around his neck, and sets the guitar down in his lap. "You finished talking to Juleka?" He asks.

"Juleka is staying with Rose tonight," Anarka informs him. She pulls a chair from inside the hallway - there aren't any in Luka's room since he usually sits on his bed - and sets it down in front of the bed, leaving the doorway open. She exhales a little, brushes her palms off on her pants, and sits up rigidly, like a Captain. Luka never understood why she liked that. It was so much more comfortable to be leaning against something, and it feels supportive anyways. "She'll be back in the morning."

"You should be a bit more careful," Luka suggests in a pianissimo tone. "They like each other. I mean, you've never been very clear on your stipulations, but-"

"I know," Anarka cuts him off with a wave of her hand, rolling her eyes.

Luka stretches his legs out. He used to be able to sit crisscrossed as a child for hours without complication, but he can't now. He has to get up to stretch his legs out. Funny how things are changing. He lays the guitar out across his lap and strums a few chords that feel stressed and anxious and the kind of acceptance you raise up when you know you're going to be hurt. Immediately, he lays the instrument aside and pulls his legs up to his chest, looking out the window with a silent acceptance that that is how this conversation will go.

"You were going to talk about how you used to work with Jagged Stone?" He reminds his mom, who sucks in a breath. She's gulping like a fish and her chest is falling at odd intervals, but Luka is used to his mom's cycle of nervousness. He goes still as she gathers her bearings.

"Jagged Stone and I met back when he was nineteen and I was twenty-three. He was a young hotshot in the music industry who thought he had an in with a record label, and I was a behind-the-scenes performer who knew better. I had the degree, the experience, the connections, and he had the passion, determination, and flare. We both held a talent firm in our grasp." Anarka begins. Luka notes, carelessly, how her story begins as she does; right in the middle of things, explaining everything at once as if it happened at once. He prefers a quieter route. What he imagines probably happened is she heard about him first, maybe glimpsed him from several increasingly shortening distances, saw him perform, and then was introduced. Slowly, not all at once.

"Jagged met me and shook my hand and immediately knew that I could help him make his mark on music. He played piano, I played guitar. He'd learned from his family - Christian folks. Straight and narrow-minded Christian folks, mind you. Not the nice ones." Anarka scoffs to show her disdain and Luka immediately finds the rests in her song and fills them in, modulating the chorus to his liking. Jagged grew up in a conservative home. Playing gospel music, not rock'n'roll. Stifling people, stifling ways. Not all Christian people were bad people, but when Christian people get bad... well, who knows how many people have died because of them? Jagged was probably the outcast of his family. And Anarka, who'd grown up on the docks of Honfleur, maintaining the historic dock and fishing for crab in her spare time. A captain's daughter. That would have been like hitting the partial note just right.

"We started practicing together and I taught him how to play guitar," Anarka continues, swinging one leg over the other and jiggling it back and forth in anxiousness as she continues reminiscing. "He took it right up and played till his fingers cracked and bled and healed over and then cracked and bled all over again. He was a natural!"

"Polytonality," Luka murmurs, still examining the world outside. He thinks it gives his mother less anxiety if he doesn't have his eye on her.

Anarka pauses, and then he can feel her nodding just like he can feel the murmurs of the ship under his bed. Every sound is alive. "Yes," She agrees. "We were a pair. And we started opening for some of the bigger numbers, and quickly grew to have a name. He wanted a new name, life, everything! So he and I stopped by a shop and laid our entire paychecks out and let them work on us until we couldn't recognize ourselves. He got his name changed, but I kept mine and I kept my life underneath me. He let it spread out."

That is, Luka thinks, the one thing his mother won't leave to chaos and mess - her past. He knows she's referring to the life she had with Grandma and Grandpa, sailing and fishing and working the dock souvenir shop on the weekends to save up for her first guitar. She keeps it near - or underneath her, as she likes to say - to keep her feet on the ground. But Jagged didn't. Jagged wanted a different identity. He wanted to make his own luck. And Luka can see this partnership falling apart before it happens.

Anarka smiles a little, tight smile. She's lost in the rubbish of her head. Luka thuds his head against the wall lightly to get her attention, and she clears her throat to continue. "Anyways! We started performing and we grew a little bit and at the end of the day we could always come home and take off the makeup and the act and it was a nice life. I liked being his stage partner." His mom's smile fades, and Luka knows he's going to have to start carrying this conversation a little. "Then things became... different."

Luka finally pulls his eyes away from the window and then turns his body, returning to crossed legs, to face his mom. He still doesn't look at her, choosing instead to examine the floor. "You didn't like the fame?" He asks.

"No," His mom shakes her head, screwing up her face in conflicted doubt of her own feelings. "No, no, not yet. I... well... he and I shared something very intense. There were the performances, the crowds screaming, and then there was... us. No makeup. No walls. Honesty. It was like we cleared out a space for quiet in all that chaos."

"So what changed?" Luke asks, twiddling his thumbs together. He has a feeling he already knows the answer.

"You," His mom says simply. "Two months before we were due on tour with someone, the, uh, doctor told us we were in love. And I started thinking then that all the spotlight might not be too good on a kid, but I didn't say nothing 'bout it to him. We canceled the tour, which he was devastated about, and soon after that, he stopped wanting to be the off-time Jagged. He always wanted to be on the stage. Barely made it to your birth because he had a bar gig set up."

Luka feels the change come slowly. It sinks into his skin and hooks into his flesh and becomes one with his bones. He's never asked about his dad because it wasn't ever really important, but Juleka has. Juleka, who had this talk before him. He can feel the music of the hull growing louder, forte, and he's not sure how he's supposed to react so he builds a little shell up around him and forces himself to remain still, expressionless. Anarka begins to speak faster.

"I got frustrated with him when he didn't want to be around so much and how when he'd come home he'd keep the act up. I didn't quite realize that his plans were to make the act _him_. I, uh, found out I was going to have Juleka a little less than a year after you, and that was kind of the last straw. I said goodbye to Jagged and goodbye to fame and I dyed my hair back to my normal color and I bought a boat in Paris and never used my stage name or put that makeup on again." Anarka claps her hands together and looks towards the window he was just looking out of, because in some ways she is like her son and she is sensitive and she doesn't know how he will take this.

The story, the rushed-out explanation, is what she says. But Luka gets something different, something far more real. He pictures a struggling twenty-five-year-old, wanting to make ends meet with the little money her duo gig earns, the boy she's choosing to love, and her baby. He pictures a twenty-one-year-old, stifled all his life, not ready to give up the fame he's worked so desperately for now that he's finally tasted it. He pictures their entire relationship falling apart and imagines Anarka weeping as she plants her feet, holds on to her past, and decides to turn back to it. Jagged kept going. Anarka came home.

"And he took off after that?" Luka asks. His voice doesn't betray any emotion. It's completely flat.

"I took off before he did, so don't mark him a deadbeat," Anarka sighs, brushing her legs off a little. "Though, he never did call to see if I was making it okay. Never did offer to pitch in any more than the child support. He took my talents that I taught him and he took his own, and two months after I left he went with a tour to England and made a name for himself. Came back with a record offer and by the time I had Juleka in my arms he had songs on the radio and his name on the charts. Magazines, TV, everything he'd ever wanted. And I had you two. Neither of us really looked back. We both got our dreams, and who really looks back when you're living that?"

Luka nods. He nods like he's taking this information well and it's not really surprising to him and like it won't take him very long to adjust. Then he picks up his guitar and tunes the soft string on it because that's what he's programmed to do in soft moments like these - write music. Hear notes. Play sounds. He wraps the strap over his shoulder and then finds his pick abandoned on top of his bedspread. "I need a moment alone," He announces. "Thank you for telling me."

"Of course, Luka. You know I'd do the world over for you, right?" Anarka asks, soft and soothing and the coda of the finale. Luka nods, and his mom leans over to kiss his cheek, and then she's gone. Out the door and leaving the chair in his room and leaving her mess of a romantic life with him. he reaches out, scoots the chair out, but leave the door open. The engine is thrumming down the wall. Is that the boiler or the water heater? Juleka's door is probably closed since he can't hear the sounds coming from there as easily. Is she okay? Somewhere outside, he can feel rumbling, torrents of shock and power as someone with a lot of virtuosi sends their talents his way. Could it be his dad, from miles away?

Or is it just his imagination, wobbling on this rocky etude?


End file.
